Studies in love and in terror

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

The door swung widely open, and Elwyn, moving instinctively back, visualized the scene before him very distinctly.

There was a screen on the right hand, a screen covered, as had been the one in his own nursery, with a patchwork of pictures varnished over.

Mrs. Bellair stood between the screen and the pale blue wall. Her slim figure was clad in some sort of long white garment, and over it she wore an apron, which he noticed was far too large for her. Her hair, the auburn hair which had been her greatest beauty, and which he had once loved to praise and to caress, was fastened back, massed up in as small a compass as possible. That, and the fact that her face was expressionless, so altered her in Elwyn's eyes as to give him an uncanny feeling that the woman before him was not the woman he had known, had loved, had left,—but a stranger, only bound to him by the slender link of a common humanity.

She waited some moments as if listening, then she came out on to the landing, and shut the door behind her very softly.

The sentence of conventional sympathy half formed on Elwyn's lips died into nothingness; as little could he have offered words of cheer to one who was being tortured; but in the dim light their hands met and clasped tightly.

"Hugo?" she said, "I want to ask you something. You told Jim just now that you were once very ill as a child,—ill like this, ill like my child. I want you to tell me honestly if that is true? I mean, were you very, very ill?"

He answered her in the same way, without preamble, baldly: "It is quite true," he said. "I was very ill—so ill that my mother for one moment thought that I was dead. But remember, Fanny, that in those days they did not know nearly as much as they do now. Your boy has two chances for every one that I had then."

"Would you mind coming in and seeing him?" Her voice faltered, it had become more human, more conventional, in quality.

"Of course I will see him," he said. "I want to see him,—dear." She had suddenly become to him once more the thing nearest his heart; once more the link between them became of the closest, most intimate nature, and yet, or perhaps because of its intensity, the sense of nearness which had sprung at her touch into being was passionless.

The face which had been drained of all expression quickened into agonized feeling. She tried to withdraw her hand from his, but he held it firmly, and it was hand in hand that together they walked into the room.